The Rest is Silence
by wild-filly
Summary: Oneshot, prequel? to Mind Games. A look into the pasts of both L and Raito and the beginnings of how they understand one another, based on their similarities and inherant differences. Character development fic, but might be shounenai if you squint.


Wild-filly: Hello again! This is a rather more analytical piece on L and Raito's relationship than Mind Games, so don't expect too much humour. It could very well take place within the confines of the story however, so interpret it as you like. This is a one-shot. I wanted to clarify just what L and Raito feel for each other in Mind Games and Chronicles of the Deceased. This is Raito and L as I hear them.

Disclaimer: wild-filly does not own Death Note. The song that separates L and Raito's points of view is "Still" by Alanis Morrissette. The title is the last line spoken by Hamlet in Shakespeare's "Hamlet".

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The Rest is Silence

………….

_I am the harm which you inflict._

_I am your brilliance and frustration._

_I am your immaturity and your indignance._

_I am your misfits and your praised._

_I am your doubt and your conviction._

He sits to my left, barely a metre away. I'm almost close enough to feel the warmth radiating through his rumpled white shirt. I can hear each breath whistle softly from his pursed lips, unwittingly released as he mulls over some inner issue, so completely hidden from me that I cannot begin to fathom how his mind works. Well, I probably could fathom it, however in order to do so, one must know what problem is at stake in order to so fathom. Even now, after spending over a month at his side, caught in twin bindings cold steel and penetrating stare simultaneously, I find myself at a loss with regards to what he thinks. Of me and my ruse. Of the Kira case. Of anything. It's not normal.

I've never met someone that I couldn't analyse, someone that I couldn't interpret and lay open, reading their every thought as if they were a book; pliant and open in my hands. Ryuuzaki is a new phenomenon in my otherwise complacent brilliance. And I'm not entirely sure why this doesn't annoy me beyond reason.

Somehow, there's something else that I feel when I watch him, crouched like a great black spider and tapping spindly fingers across the glowing white of his computer. It's not admiration, I'm certain. It's not something as crude and blatant as lust, so perish that thought. Yagami Raito is asexual. He can ignore such foolish bodily impulses as that. My ability to reject Misa's petulant and repeated advances should be evidence enough of that claim.

No, there's something else about Ryuuzaki that preoccupies my mind. Something that even my superior intellect cannot quite give a name to. Something that prevents me from throwing everything I have at him, just in the hope that his resolve will flicker and he'll forget to keep his guard up. And then he will be as vulnerable, as mentally exposed, as I feel around him.

I'd give anything for a glance into the inner workings of his mind. There's never been another quite like it.

I've always been a genius: I've known this fact ever since I was a small child. Since before most other children learn what the word means. It wasn't a particularly startling discovery for me. I can remember staring out of the window at kindergarten, usually sitting a little way off from the other children, and quite suddenly just wondering why I was there. It wasn't the irrational fear of a child separated from its mother, but the cool logic of one who is bemused by the false chirpiness of the child-minders, and wondered what the point of their pretence was. I found myself play-acting the role of a small child, while my mind increasingly awakened to question and contemplate the world. I don't know why I took to subterfuge so quickly. Maybe I realised even then that if I wanted to succeed in the world, it would be better if no one ever knew everything there was to know about me.

Either way, I was looking down on people by the grand old age of five, and I've only improved with age. My contempt for the world's inferior intellect has been honed to a fine and subtle point, finer than the most slender needle: so sharp that you don't even realise that it has punctured your flesh until it's too late. I can drain you of self-worth, self-respect and confidence with one swift word, one disarming smile, and walk away with your entire personality categorised, filed and degraded.

It seems rather appropriate for me to compare myself to something as cold and sharp as a needle. What is a needle but a tool, plied to make the world into a better place in some insignificant, but noticeable manner? But in that sense I am no needle. A sword, perhaps? A sharp, cold instrument of death that makes an impact, but those upon whom I make the impact don't even realise, until they are claimed by cold death, cut down under the slash of an imperious hand.

Yes, a sword. But I began as a needle.

What would Ryuuzaki be? I toss the thought carelessly around my head as I watch him. Thick back hair obscures his wide-eyed vision, forming a physical veil of secrecy to complement his every word, laden with lies and intrigue. I shouldn't be so fascinated by him, but I can't help it. It's a morbid fascination. More simply put, he's smarter than he looks, and he looks damnably odd.

I still can't believe that he's been able to make such a fool out of me. It makes no sense, and that's not the worst of it. It's the first time that I've ever been unable to understand something, and it's not a welcome feeling.

I've been dealing with what passes for human sense for as long as I can remember. I have always known that I could see things with one glance that others had to labour over for hours. I spent most of my school hours staring blankly into a textbook, thoughtlessly tearing apart the alibis of historical excuses, depersonalising and reanimating the hopeless figures that conducted the aimless orchestras of countless wars. Or shredding away the cloak of characterisation that barely conceals a myriad of authors from the mirrors that are their own literary works. Cutting away the mystery of human existence, experience and emotion with curt strokes of a crude pencil.

And here I sit without my familiar weapon. Is it ironic that the Death Note plied it to its most vicious use? That I have made my mark in the world not with a gun, nor with a sword, but a pencil? It is not the Death Note that has brought such a reign of terror over this selfish world, but rather my own hand, my own instrument of written expression.

At school everything I was taught came to me as though I were recalling something that I had simply forgotten. Re-reading words on a page, recalling different theories, different calculations. All of it was easy. Too easy, almost. Numbers fell through my fingers as though sifted by some kind of internal calculator. Words blossomed effortlessly from my pen, staining my page with an easy eloquence while others watched on in delight. My insatiable mind gorged itself on whatever literature crossed its path, and the pieces of my world view fell ever faster into the places that I had already outlined for them. Finally I thought it pertinent to reveal some of the fire that had been smouldering in my head since before the age of reason. And they loved it. They craved it.

_They_. Why is it so easy for me to refer to my elders, and supposed intellectual equals, in such a distant term?

Perhaps because I have no equal. Not truly at least.

I had so much potential, they kept repeating. You're a genius. You're special.

And yet they were not?

Maybe I would have been happier with the world if I had remained in that classroom, only taking in the parts of the world that were handed to me, perfectly wrapped and presented in books: crisp; clean and proper. I could have been a professor, locked behind a wall of paper, lost in the world of my own thoughts and completely isolated from the world that I so painstakingly analysed and interpreted. But I never had a chance to be so brilliant and naïve.

My father, the one who first noticed my brilliant mind, is the one to blame.

Despite my awareness that biology is all that ties me to the man, I still couldn't help but wonder about the world in which he worked. Every morning, at exactly a quarter to seven, he would clump down the wooden staircase in his pristine police uniform, lovingly laundered and ironed by my mother. He would kiss my mother gingerly on the cheek and then disappear out the front door, leaving us to join his other world: the world that he never brought home, and wasn't allowed to discuss at the dinner table. I stood at the door every morning to wish him farewell, as my sister Sayu lolled in my mother's arms. With a straight back and arms pinned to my sides, I played the role of dutiful young son to a tee, watching father's back retreating from the front of the house and down to our waiting car.

Of course I knew where he went. There are some things that can't be so easily hidden from one's family. I pawed through address books and different piles of paper, voraciously seeking answers. Father never spoke much about his work, but that wasn't enough to keep me out of his business. It didn't take long before I was slipping papers from his briefcase, realising that it was within those shiny leather bindings that the truth actually laid. Sneaking them off into my room and poring over them in private, I knew fine that no one would question my actions.

No one expects a child to make sense of important police documents.

No one expects a child to read those documents from cover to cover with a growing sense of horror aching in their chest with every gory, revolting and derogatory detail.

Murders, rape, assaults, threats. People killing other people in sick, twisted and intricately planned ways. Photographs of the scenes, the tearful families of the victims, and the sullen leers of the guilty culprit, marched to the gallows. Details about suspects released on parole. Details about suspects that couldn't be charged, due to lack of evidence, or chalked up mental excuses. All of these I absorbed quietly on the thin carpet of my bedroom floor, lying on my belly and staring at the sprawl of papers before me, and their dismal portrait of the world.

Is it so unexpected that I ended up so disappointed in human integrity?

Is Ryuuzaki disappointed?

Perhaps that is why he fascinates me so.

Either way, I think that was the turning point for me. All of my life had been sheltered behind nursery walls, and the confines of my house and primary school. Now, by my own doing, I was dragged into a dreadful awareness of the world at an age when I was still tender enough to be affected by it. Even though I was condescending back then, that doesn't mean that I was cynical. I was still essentially an innocent. Now that I dwell on it, I wonder if that is what made me so keen to use the Death Note for justice. An ordinary person would have been horrified by its powers; too scared to raise the scythe and kill in the name of a better world. Now I knew that a scythe was a far cleaner weapon than most people used.

I had already experienced my share of horror, and had emerged without an answer. The Death Note was no terrible weapon to fall into my trembling hands. My hands were trembling, but it was with excitement, not fear. I had had enough of being disgusted with the world that existed beyond the intellectual pleasantries of my books. I had an answer to the distopia. Aren't geniuses supposed to find answers to the world's problems?

I could build my own utopia. Sculpted with a genius's intellect and a child's idealism. I could regain my own faith in the world, and shuck myself free from the boredom that I was emerged in.

Now if only Ryuuzaki weren't the one standing against me in this vision.

_I am your charity and your rape._

_I am your grasping and expectation._

_I am your joy and your regret._

_I am your fury and your elation._

_I am your faithless and your religion._

Sometimes I wonder why I allow him to sit so close. His agenda is still a haze to me. He confuses me in a way that I've never known. It's so very strange, and yet so utterly fascinating as well. Like a new virus perhaps? I doubt that Raito-kun would be amused to hear that I just inwardly likened him to a disease. Not that I would ever tell him that. I know better than to tell him anything.

Telling people the truth is harder than telling them a passable variant thereof. After so many years of practice at it, I don't even think about it when I'm lying through my teeth. Some would call that a disorder. I prefer to term it a defence mechanism.

Raito knows that I believe that he is Kira. He knows that I will never fully trust him, even if the fruits of my laborious investigation prove him innocent. Such is the nature of our "friendship." I spin one story, and watch him unravel it, while he feeds me a fiction of his own creating, and I in turn dissect it, and return the favour. I've never been completely honest with anyone in my life, yes, but I've never been so judicious with the truth either. Is that the kind of sense that a completely innocent person is supposed to project on another human being, or am I wrong? I doubt it. But then again, I am becoming a little concerned with the fact that it's catching my attention in more ways than one. Could I possibly be wrong, or is it something else?

Do I truly wish that Raito-kun were my friend, or that I could understand him?

I don't even know the answer to that question, and I'm supposed to be the one in charge of this investigation. It spells disaster for us all, if that's the case.

It's peculiar, but as I watch him, or turn my attention more closely to his own eyes, he recoils. They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but Raito's eyes are layered, screened from projecting their true intentions on the world. I've looked into those rich mahogany brown pupils so often now that I've lost count of the excuses for my behaviour. It's not that I find them attractive, of course, but rather because there's something different about them. Something that I can't quite explain with my encyclopaedic knowledge of psychology. Raito doesn't operate like other people, no matter how much he tries to fool me into thinking that he is simply an innocent victim, a passive bystander who was roped into the Kira case by sheer bad luck and his own exceptional intelligence.

Those eyes show as much to me as if Raito were being truly honest. If a person's eyes are used to lying, then so too is the owner of those eyes. If I weren't so frustrated with the fact that I don't know which of Raito-kun's statements to believe, I'd probably find it funny.

After all, the eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul. Not mirrors.

But what has brought Raito-kun to look at me with my own eyes? We have virtually nothing in common according to his files.

I have been a detective since I was six years old. My first case was the hunt for the murderer of my parents. Perhaps that explains a few things about my personality.

I'll never admit it to anyone, but the day that I learned of their deaths struck me more deeply than could ever be speculated. My caretakers at the first orphanage I was sent to, and then the staff at Wammy's house, were all very cautious about what might have happened to me in the light of this twin tragedy. They were obsessed with gently probing my aching mind for any weakness, regardless of the fact that I just wanted to be left alone to reorder my world without the two people who were both my carers and my captors. Like surgeons of the brain, they only wanted to carve away the diseased tissue and help me get well, so that they could put the rest of my mind to use. They were only trying to help, I know; only trying to see how deep the wounds went, so they could treat them. But that doesn't mean that I was going to let them in that far. I wrapped myself in the blanket of my intellect, buried myself in the books that my parents loved, and covered up the bubbling scar tissue with too many layers of thought to be probed with pseudo-medical gibberish.

I embraced the wealth of my parents' knowledge as only a hurt child can do: unconditionally, blindly and desperately seeking comfort. Only Watari himself seemed to realise what I was doing, as he stood watch over me, but we've never spoken of it. We've never needed to. He's the only one who stayed with me during that time and didn't try to help me. I can never express my gratitude enough.

The day I left home forever still resounds in my head, even now, with all of the terrifying clarity of a nightmare, and none of the relief that comes with waking.

Ironically, it had during the early light hours of a clear spring morning. My shabbily painted room was dully lit and musky with dust and mothballs. Huddled in bed, under thin sheets and one patchwork quilt, I lay and watched the particles of dust float through the streams of thick golden light trickling through my faded curtains. I could vaguely hear voices in the next room, which made me stiffen. There had been no one else in the house earlier. They must have come in when I was sleeping.

Awakened by a spike of nervous energy, I shuffled my feet out from the warm cave of my bedding and slowly manoeuvred out of bed. A little dizzy from the sudden movement, I padded lightly across the floor and craned my head up to look through the keyhole of my door. The door was locked, just like it usually was, but someone had taken the key out of the ancient mechanism, so I could peer into the brighter room beyond. It also meant that I could hear the muffled voices of the intruders more clearly.

"-can't expect me to do this. I'm not his aunt, or anything! I'm just the neighbour!"

Another rumble of speech filled the air. "Then the boy will have to go into foster care, ma'am. Are you sure that there are no other relatives, or friends of the family?"

"None." She hissed. I could just see the hem of her floral print skirt, and thick grey stockings. The rest of her wizened form was shielded from my eyes. "Those two maniacs just moved in here a couple of weeks ago, bringing their child with them. I might have guessed that they were criminals or something, what with their strange comings and goings at all hours of the night. Do you know that they leave the child locked in that room? Even when neither of them are in the house? It's not right! It's not normal!"

"We didn't know ma'am." The foreign voice sounded uncomfortable. "We're here to take him into proper care now anyway. I'm sure we'll be able to help the boy adjust with a normal life. Do you know what the child's name is? The birth certificate was a bit…strange."

There was a snort. "Don't ask me! The only reason I had a key to their door is because I was friends with the people who used to live here."

By now I was staring blankly at the wall, painted a sunny yellow but cracking in spider-webs at the edges, where the cheap paint was beginning to pull away. Their discordant words became distant, and the scratchy detail of the paint all the more engrossing.

My father had never been the best at handiwork around the house, always preferring to move house rather than deal with the problems in the one in which we were currently living. It didn't matter too much to me. We never spent more than a couple of months in one place anyway, and seldom in the same place as each other. Mother was usually away, father less often. They never told me where they went, but it didn't matter. I had their books when they left, and the company of whichever tutor or neighbour they had lined up for me to be watched over by. I hardly bothered interacting with those surrogates. They were always foreign, always judgmental. Usually they were civil enough, but sometimes my parents hadn't done their background checks thoroughly enough.

While we were staying in a large European city, I don't know which, we lived on the second floor of a townhouse, and the older woman on the third floor was responsible for me. I forgot to turn up for dinner at six o'clock, as I was lost in thought, reading my father's copy of _Hamlet_. When I finally traipsed up the bare concrete stairs to her house, she threw open the chipped front door and screamed at me for being an ungrateful brat. I had stared at her, fascinated by the boiling red of her cheeks, and how the yellow of her teeth was strangely pale against the angry scarlet of her tonsils. Her pupils were grey discs swimming in a bloodshot sea. There was entirely too much red in her face. When she was finished shouting, I turned to troupe back down the stairs, and felt the edge of her slipper in the small of my back.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the couch in my apartment, gazing vaguely up at the watermarked ceiling. My head was on my father's lap, and the rest of me was covered in a thin patchwork blanket, which I recognised as taken from my own bed. My limbs all seemed to be bruised, and my head hurting in a most intense fashion. It was as if every bone in my body had been shaken. My father's massive black eyes stared worriedly down at me, even wider than usual and marred with fatigue. I didn't ask what had happened. I didn't need to. We left that house the very same night, before the police arrived and the neighbours started to get suspicious about the silence of our neighbour on the third floor.

And now here I was, hearing some gruff stranger telling the woman reluctantly looking after me that my parents were dead and that I was now a ward of the state. I don't know exactly why I was so stunned, but even now it makes me pause. Mother and father had hardly been model individuals, now that can compare their treatment of me to that of other parents to their offspring, but they had been mine. My father's blank, staring eyes, the unruly black tresses of my mother: I took the shadows of their colouring, but can still vividly remember the startling blue of my mother's almond eyes, and the hazelnut brown of my father's smooth locks. Light and dark combined, while I was one with the shadow. I mused over that notion for a long time, and still do every so often. It's one of my most jealously guarded memories, and not one that I will share with anyone. Ever.

Yes, though I had only flashes of parenthood, I took solace in my parents' comings and goings, and devoured the books and papers that they left in their wake. Unwitting gifts they may have been, but still ones that I cherished. I don't know exactly how and when I learned how to read, but it seems to have been something that just came to me. My mother sat down next to me once, folding up her angular limbs on the floor where I was hunched over a battered jigsaw and showed me the alphabet one afternoon, and from then on it was all a new linguistic puzzle. Neither mother nor father ever commented on the surreal speed of my brain. Perhaps they never realised. I never really mattered to me, so I never pursued it.

But that was long ago. It has no bearing on today, nor does it explain why I watch Raito and see only myself. We have nothing in common, and yet we tread the steps of the same convoluted dance.

I have to wonder what it means, and what result could possibly come of this.

_I see you altering history._

_I see you abusing the land._

_I see you, your selective amnesia,_

_I love you still._

_And I love you still._

His stare is unnerving, but for some reason I can't quite draw my gaze away from it, no matter how much it makes the inside of my head itch. I know that to look him directly in the eye is almost as good as an admission of guilt, but I can't help it. He just seems so vulnerable, so anxious on some occasions, and then he switches and is hostile, armed with a cutting wit and sharp gestures. There is no medium ground with Ryuuzaki. It's all I can do to make sure that I don't blurt out the truth, just to see what he'd do. I sometimes wonder if that's all it would take – just one little sentence: "You're right, I'm Kira." What would he do then?

Of course, I'll never know, because I'll never tell him. I can never admit defeat, just as he never can. That's one thing that we both have in common.

The Death Note is more than a means to a perfect future: it's also the reason why I met Ryuuzaki in the first place. Ryuuk was wrong to call such a gift a curse. Yes, it's terrible in its own way, I admit it. The revelation that another Death Note existed, and that it lay in the temperamental, idiotic hands of Misa was a moment of pure horror for me. Such tools are not for the simple minded. In fact, I have to wonder what Ryuuzaki would have done if he had been given the Death Note instead of Misa.

Would he have destroyed it, such a priceless item that could do so much good in the right, intelligent hands?

Would he have done as I do now, and moved to construct a perfect world?

Would we be rivals for the ownership of the world, or perhaps working together?

Those are dangerous thoughts, and there's no telling what the answer to that question would be.

It's funny to think about it, but in truth, that is all that seems to separate us: our stances on the Kira case. It's almost hilarious just how wonderfully we operate as a team. I've noticed how the rest of the investigation squad stares on in disbelief as L and I trade theories, announce suspects and shift in seamless unison towards the same answer. I've watched their mouths fall open, jaws slack and eyes wide. It's oddly gratifying, but not nearly as stirring as the look that flies to Ryuuzaki's face as he does so. I think the most normal that I've ever seen him is when he's on the trail. It's almost as if he forgets that he still suspects me most of all of being Kira, as he seizes the trail and we chase after another candidate. His eyes widen even further, but there's a new light in them. A glimmer of something other than his usual guarded brilliance. The best description I can think of it as if someone has puffed a dose of air onto a glowing coal, flashing a flare into the dark atmosphere. Even when pushing my brain to its limits, racing to keep pace with Ryuuzaki's own brilliant mind, I can't help but sneak glances at him. It's just so exhilarating to see him relax and enter his element. It almost feels as if we really are friends, and this isn't just a ruse between rivals.

_I am your tragedy and your fortune._

_I am your crisis and delight._

_I am your profits and your prophets._

_I am your art, I am your vice._

He's staring at me again, and I know not what I should say. Far too frequently I retreat behind my mocking stabs to try and put him off guard, rather than come clean and tell him my thoughts. I'm tempted to be honest, to tell him that he confuses me and that I'll never be completely sure of what to make of him, whether he's innocent or guilty. But I dread the result.

It would be such a strange thing, to be completely open with someone. I am strangely drawn towards confession, but know that it will never happen, no matter what the result of this investigation is. Raito is too much, too intelligent. Anything I say to him will remain with him alone, yes, but that's enough in itself. To tell one person the truth is to uncover its secrecy. Not only would I be removing the cover on a secret long coveted and sought after by caretakers and psychologists alike, but I would be exposing myself to the one person most likely to exploit such weakness. I do not know what he thinks of me, regardless of what he says.

I can never trust him, but he's the one person I want most of all to trust. Such a startling conclusion.

I can rehearse conversations in my head, just as I rehearse the lies and stories that I feed to the variety of civilians that I have to put at ease. This is a stage whereupon I can be as judiciously honest as I wish. Perhaps this is the only place where I can be completely honest with Raito-kun. It will have to be enough. _I don't know whether I'd be making a terrible mistake, letting you know something that you could so easily turn against me. I don't trust you. I'm not that foolish. After all, part of what fascinates me about you is the fact that I can't know what you're thinking. Even if I did know, I'm certain that I couldn't trust you not to use such information against me. I'd do exactly the same thing. We are two people of the same ilk, from completely different backgrounds._

_There's something about you that I can't interpret_.

Intoxication of the senses can be both a pleasure and a poison.

I shall never know which you are, Raito-kun.

_I am your death and your decisions._

_I am your passion and your plight._

_I am your sickness and convalescence._

_I am your weapons and your light._

I look at him and don't know what I see. I look at him, and it's as if someone has held a mirror to my face. It's those eyes of his. There's something about them that makes me wonder: wonder whether or not I've made the right decisions in taking up the Death Note. Wonder whether I'm truly as intelligent as I keep telling myself, and everyone else around me.

I look at him with calmness that only goes as far as my skin. He returns the favour, but his eyes tell me otherwise. Truly, we are far more alike than I would care to admit.

But there's something else to him that I can't quite put my finger on. I can only imagine what he is thinking. That will have to be enough.

_I see you holding your grudges_

_I see you gunning them down._

_I see you lie to your country._

_I see you blaming each other._

_And I love you still._

_And I love you still._


End file.
